Macbeth by LorinBurte

Let's get started. Act I, Scene 1, according to the stage directions, takes place where?

The Weird Sisters use this phrase as Macbeth approaches, a phrase later used in a 1962 'dark fantasy' novel.

As the plot is hatched to (spoiler alert) kill King Duncan, Lady Macbeth fears that Macbeth cannot go through with it because he is too full of this distasteful thing.

In Act 4, the great healing powers of what contemporary King of England are described in contrast to Macbeth's tyranny?

This character was made into a hero in the Shakespeare play due to contemporary political concerns, was a villain in Holinshed's Chronicles and according to most scholarship was actually fictional.

In his Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow soliloquy in Act V, Macbeth uses this phrase, later used as a title for a best selling novel and oddly, the title of an episode of Murder, She Wrote.

Shakespeare is so problematic: Taming of the Shrew, Othello, The Merchant of Venice. In Macbeth, when the Sisters are mixing their magic potion, in addition to eye of newt and toe of frog, they add the liver of what, reflecting a common prejudice in early 17th century England?

Profound and beautiful even when mixing the metaphor, Shakespeare creates this 'measurement' phrase for Macbeth in Act V, using a basic unit of one characteristic with an overall measure of a different dimension to indicate (as one description put it simplistically) how long the futility of life will endure.

With 719 lines of dialogue, Macbeth of course has the most lines in the play and Lady Macbeth has the second most with 265. Which character has the next most with 215 lines?

Polymathic author Gary Wills in 1996 wrote this work, placing Macbeth in the context of the intrigues of Jacobean England, particularly the 1605 Gunpowder plot.

With so many excellent Macbeth movies, my favorite is this 1990 adaptation starring John Tutrurro, Dennis Farina and Stanley Tucci, among others, said by some to be a more accurate portrayal of the underworld than The Godfather or Goodfellas.

Sorry Verdi. For an opera adaptation, we'll go with what controversial work, where its composer justified the murderous act as a reaction to the circumstances of oppression in pre-revolutionary Russia? Stalin himself may have written a Pravda article condemning it.

In a wonderful anecdote, Christopher Hitchens related how Salman Rushdie would come up with the names of Shakespeare's plays had Robert Ludlum written them. Hamlet would have been 'The Elsinore Vacillation' and Othello 'The Kerchief Implication', What did Rushdie say Ludlum would have called Macbeth?

Now we get to the curse. In 1936, The Negro Theater Project of Harlem presented a version of Macbeth sited in 19th century Haiti, with voodoo replacing British witchcraft. A writer for the New York Herald Tribune panned it, whereupon he promptly caught pneumonia and died. The production was directed by what auteur, who would later film Macbeth, Othello and a renowned adaptation of Henry IV?

I try to write a quiz based on information I know prior to writing it. This fact relating to the curse I only learned while fact checking the previous question, but it is too good to pass up. In 1953, an outdoor production of Macbeth was staged at a castle in Bermuda (directed by Burgess Meredith). In it there was a scene with Macbeth actually bestride a horse. His tights had been treated with kerosene for some reason, which when put into contact with the horses sweat, actually ignited. The actor, from whose autobiography this story comes, writhed and yelled "Get them off me!", not in the script. Name this well known actor, who later portrayed the Player King in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 Hamlet.